On the march . . . in support of the miners, 1972. Photograph: PA Photo

How do you write readable social history? Few historians have found a perfect answer. Do you focus narrowly and intensely, as Carlo Ginzburg did in his 1976 classic The Cheese and the Worms, which recreated an entire world from the persecution of a single 16th-century heretic; or do you try to cover every major event and trend in a given era, as David Kynaston has recently done in his bestselling books about Britain in the 40s and 50s? There are always trade-offs: between narrative pace and comprehensiveness, between being clear and panoramic and leaving room for texture, ambiguity, fresh thinking.

Dominic Sandbrook is a big-picture man. Like Kynaston, he is engaged in an enormous, multi-volume project to straighten out Britain's tangled postwar history. Sandbrook's previous books, Never Had It So Good and White Heat – borrowing such famous period catchphrases signalled a certain populism, as did subtitles also shoehorning in the Beatles and the swinging 60s – covered 1956 to 1970, and were close to a thousand pages each. This book is even denser: a 762-page treatment of barely the first third of the British 70s. The tightly printed paragraphs, often almost a page long, roll forward like queueing juggernauts, each laden with facts about the eventful era of Edward Heath.

Sandbrook covers the rise of inflation and glam rock, the decline of deference and cinema audiences, and the dark arts of the period's football and industrial relations. His encyclopedic approach works well with medium-ranking and semi-forgotten figures such as Heath's home secretary, Reginald Maudling, a drifting, corrupt man by the 70s, "beginning every day with brandy at breakfast and gin throughout the morning". The book switches with practised ease between the players of high politics, emblematic ordinary citizens selected from old newspaper stories, and the larger social, economic and cultural forces that were changing Britain from the battered-but-confident postwar country it had been to the shinier-but-more-anxious country it was becoming.

At times, Sandbrook seems almost eerily all-knowing about Britain between the mid-50s and the mid-70s – and very keen to share all that knowledge with us. "In 1976," he writes, straying outside the book's boundaries, as he often does, "the number of Chinese takeaways officially overtook that of fish and chip shops." Such details can be potent, but become less so in bulk, and he rarely uses one example where five will do. Nor can he resist digressions: does the book really need a potted history of Heath's home town of Broadstairs, however neatly done, going back to the fifth century and "Hengist and Horsa, by legend the first of the Anglo-Saxons"?

Sandbrook gives his lengthy chapters momentum with more propulsive sections on the rise and fall of the Heath government. There are comprehensive, if not revelatory, accounts of the successful negotiations to enter the EEC, the oil crisis and the three-day week, and the 1972 and 1974 miners' strikes that first discredited and then destroyed Heath's ambitious but panicky administration. A more original section on the little-written-about council workers' strike of 1970 – "rubbish piled up in the streets . . . raw sewage poured into the nation's rivers" – is used to suggest that Heath, who had then been in office less than six months, governed in an atmosphere of crisis almost from the start. This argument is novel but open to question: as late as September 1973, less than six months before he fell, the Economist reflected quite a widely held view by insisting, "Britain is two-thirds of the way to an economic miracle".

The book is supple and thoughtful enough to acknowledge that for most Britons 1970-74 was a time not of fear and chaos but of unprecedented "prosperity and comfort". For the first time, "many people had cars . . . central heating . . . indoor toilets . . . gleaming new kitchens". Yet Sandbrook's default mode is still standard 70s-apocalyptic. He calls the middle of the decade "the most terrifying economic crisis in modern British history", which rather downplays both the early 80s recession, when unemployment reached more than double its 70s peak, and riots – of a sort not seen in the 70s – tore through dozens of British towns and cities; and also the 2007-10 financial crisis, the full consequences of which we can still only guess at.

Ultimately, for all the energy and scope, too much here feels over-familiar. The title is almost identical to that of a 1983 volume, States of Emergency, by the historians Keith Jeffery and Peter Hennessy, which was also in part about the struggles of the Heath government. Sandbrook's writing can be predictable: Ulster is a "quagmire" for Heath, "the rot had set in" for British industry, politicians of all parties try to "sweep" difficult issues "under the carpet". At other times his prose feels recycled: a description of Heath's election victory in 1970 too faithfully echoes an account of the same event in his previous book White Heat.

Meanwhile, other passages – including ones on the 1972 miners' strike, the official celebrations accompanying Britain's EEC entry, the founding of the feminist magazine Spare Rib, and the arrival of Harold Wilson at Downing Street after Heath's February 1974 election defeat – closely resemble parts of my 2009 history of the 70s, in their language, pacing and choice of material. Sandbrook quite properly acknowledges my book in his footnotes, as he does the other dozen volumes on which he heavily relies. But a reader might expect a book of this scale and ambition, which contains almost no original interviews or first-hand descriptions, to do a bit more sifting and transforming of its secondary sources.

All history is collage to an extent. Yet the British 70s already have a huge literature, especially the culture and sport that Sandbrook so tirelessly covers. What the history of the 70s needs, like the history of other, still relatively familiar recent eras, is new stories, new angles. Without them, books like this are just jukeboxes: enjoyable for a few minutes at a time, but you've heard most of these tunes before.

Andy Beckett's When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies is published by Faber.